JOBS: Time is passing and the jobs are filling up fast on Maryland Avenue. It sems more and more like Jon Schnur isn't going to end up working at the Department after all. Ditto for Andy Rotherham. So what happened? Personalities? Nanny problems? Ideological differences? Power politics? Someone should find out. Both were considered shoo-ins not so long ago.

OLD TIMES: Back in DC for the EWA annual conference, good to see lots of familiar faces and friends though I'm always aware of how different what I do is from what most ed journalists do.

NEW MEDIA NEWS: At a new media session (the web, it's so neat, so new!), Alan Gottlieb is telling a story about how his online education watchdog outfit (Education News Colorado) is creating all sorts of battles within the board and with the Denver Post. The suburban supes don't like the scrutiny, the business folks are all for accountability. The print and web sides of the Denver Post don't know what to do with each other's education coverage. (Extra credit: "Objectivity is over-rated," says Gottlieb.)

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Green from GothamSchools says loves doing the online reporting and the quick response and transparency and awareness are great, but that she's not sure what happens next with the site, given the economic situation. Sounds like they're putting out for outside foundation money for next year. No news yet on what happens to Green's time once she starts her Spencer Fellowship in September.

Last night around 7:30 the White House issued the attached press release announcing the nomination of Anthony Wilder Miller as Deputy Secretary. A Purdue grad with a long string of private sector jobs, with a smidgen of budget work with LAUSD thrown in for good measure, Miller most recently worked at an investment firm called Silver Lake.

Bring on the deluge of disgust and excitement! Didn't private sector guys just run our economy into the ground? Isn't someone with strategic expertise just what we need to make our schools dramatically better? Yes! Yes! Yes!

Read on for the nomination, and scroll to the bottom for some helpful starter links with which to support your excitement or outrage whichever it may be.

Bennet says education his issue Denver PostBennet
doesn't sit on the Senate education committee, where significant reform
legislation is expected to originate. He would work with the White
House and committee members in developing the bill, his staff said.

Attempting to fix inner city schools without fixing the city in which they are embedded is like trying to clean the air on one side of a screen door. - Jean Anyon.

David Berliner's "Our Impoverished View of Education," provides a corrective to the post modern, counter-factual speculations of the recent McKinsey report. Building on generations of social science, Berliner offers fresh insights into the "600 pound gorilla" of closing the achievement gap - zip codes. The challenge is the interacting complexities of neighborhoods including low birth weight, lead and mercury poisoning, stress, poor nutrition, asthma, crime and domestic violence, mobility, inadequate child care, alcohol and drug abuse, and mental illness. After all, a poor child spends 1000 hours per year in school and 5000 hours at home in the neighborhood.

Berliner is impressed with two studies that show how increased family income affects student behavior and school achievement. In one study, children whose families' income went up showed increased school readiness and scored as well as the students who had never been poor. In another study, after four years of moving out of poverty, formerly poor children had no more psychiatric symptoms than children who had never been poor. - John Thompson

State Stabilization Fund Update Ed.gov To date, over $7 billion in Recovery Act funding under the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund has been approved for eight states:

#1,958,125 with a Bullet Mike Antonucci
Since
this seems to be a week for educators and self-published novels, let’s
take a look at Crazy Fortunes, the romance novel penned by Lawrence,
Massachusetts, school principal Beth Gannon.

The recent announcement that scads of Chicago schools were going year-round sounded like a really good thing (Tribune: More Chicago schools adopt year-round schedule). Then it turned out that the schedule change (called Track E) doesn't actually create more instructional hours or days for kids, it just spread them out more evently during the year. Chicago's anemic 170-day schedule remains. And the vast majority of schools making the change -- voluntarily, Chicago says -- just happen to be located in Chicago's impoverished South and West sides.

"Bonus pay for performance is also on its way out, at least for now," according to Scholastic Administrator's Salary Report 2009, which quotes AASA's Dan Domenech on the topic: “It’s almost become counterproductive,” says Domenech. “It’s become increasingly difficult to evaluate performance. School boards are forced to question the intention of superintendents, asking them if the financial incentive had affected their decision-making.”

NB: Looking beyond the headlines, there is some substantive disagreement. Contrast the Times story immediately above with the AP's Libby Quaid, who writes: "The biggest gains came from low-achieving students.
That probably is not an
accident; the federal No Child Left Behind law and similar state laws
have focused on improving the performance of minority and poor
children, who struggle the most."

Schools walk delicate line in swine flu response MSNBCSwine
flu poses a conundrum for school officials, who must balance schools’
critical role in monitoring the spread of the virus by staying open
with their responsibility to keep kids safe. MSN

Forget Obama's first 100 days. A fixture in Washington education circles for years, NEA veteran Joel Packer is apparently retiring this week. (Still waiting for confirmation but I think it's true.) They're partying at the NEA on Thursday, from 6 to 8 PM. Well-wishers are invited to attend. No RSVP required.

UPDATE: It's been confirmed by the Packmeister himself, and was apparently first posted over at EIA a couple of months ago. Free drinks on the NEA!

Thanks to Stephen Colbert, you can now donate to "military-serving public schools," which I think he said means schools with 50 percent or more parents in the military, organized by military branch (Army, Navy, etc.). As usual, I admire DonorsChoose's creativity in always coming up with new schemes and angles, while at the same time I'm a little bit creeped out. Imagine if the Stimulus bill put them in charge of giving out the education bailout money.

The McKinsey report, "The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools," argues that America's GDP might be $2.3 trillion greater if the achievement gap disappeared after we read The Nation at Risk.

The report resembles an Onion parody, displaying nuggets of information with the full glory of digital graphics while being literally absurd. McKinsey’s scatter-grams isolate three pairs of neighboring states with large achievement gap differences. Three pages later, hidden in a multi-colored display, is the best explanation for the gaps. The lagging states have far greater black child poverty rates. Who would have thunk it? Delaware’s rate, for instance, is 50% worse than Maryland's, a gap-closer of that chart. In another part of the study, however, Delaware is cited as one of the success stories in closing the achievement gap.

On the HotSeat, Mark Simon of the reform-minded Mooney Institute talks about union-foundation collaboration (he's for it), progressive union leadership (there's more of it than you think), and debunks the myth that progressive union local presidents are usually defeated. Then he slams the Obama administration for not hiring enough progressive union types (yet).

Simon tells us how the Mooney Institute grew out of TURN, and what unions (and reformers) can do to improve academic achievement. Then he predicts that KIPP will be unionized within a year and that "thin" contracts aren't all they're hyped up to be. He's all over the place, this guy.

Along the way I make him explain or apologize for everything union-related I can think of.

Thanks to TFA Michele for suggesting this interview. If you've got
ideas about who would be good -- innovative, counterintuitive, candid
people who might not otherwise get the attention but have interesting things to say -- let me know.]

Ohio school closed in response to swine flu case AP The third-grader, who is recovering at home, had recently visited
several Mexican cities while on vacation with his family, state health
officials said Sunday. His is among 40 cases of swine flu that have
been confirmed in the U.S.

Balto. Co. school year to end 4 days early Baltimore SunThe school year in Baltimore County's public schools will end four days
earlier than originally scheduled, because not all of the snow days
built into the calendar were used, officials said Monday.

Cutting Costs, Florida Trims High School Games NPRHigh
school athletes in Florida will play fewer games for the next two years
under a new rule approved by the Florida High School Athletic
Association that is designed to save money during tough economic times.

Duncan's gain is reporters' loss Politico Massie
Ritsch is
leaving the center for an appointment at the U.S. Department of
Education, where he'll be overseeing outreach to education
associations, foundations and think-tanks. [a little old but...]

Lessons of the McKinsey Report LFABusiness champions of school reform have
admittedly lost some of their luster in the current economic
environment. Still, let's not ignore some of the report's most critical conclusions.

Swine Flu and Laptops
Jim Moulton
Several
years back, at a conference held in Boston by the Anytime Anywhere
Learning Foundation (AALF), I was introduced to a school leader from
rural Québec who was advocating for 1:1 laptop distribution.

Ode to Joy Andy SmarickWe
DC-based policy types are susceptible to getting dangerously far
removed from the quotidian thrills and struggles of real schools. So I
visited four schools earlier this week while in NYC. It was a complete
delight

Events, jobs, resources, reports. Fritz has it all. (Well, not swine flu hype and not the latest Lindsay Lohan update.) Just think, though. You would have had this an hour ago if you subscribed to the free daily FritzWire. Meantime, check out the Monday morning edition below.

Al Sharpton compares people like me to George Wallace, saying we are "smiling liberals" and "all a bunch of condescending bigots." We "co-conspirators" and "door blockers" are robbing America of $670 billion per year because we protect the educational "status quo."

Forty years ago, the United States had the highest graduation rate in the world, but we also had an industrial base. If my students’ parents were making $30 to $40 per hour for blue collar work, as opposed to $6 or $7 or so, perhaps we would still be making significant progress in closing the Achievement Gap. So, do we condemn our liberal brethren for failing to defeat Supply Side Economics and the deindustrialization of America? Do we need new witch trials into "Who Lost Health Care?," "Who Lost Welfare?," and "Who Lost the War to End the War on Drugs?."

The bigger question for the EEP, and Sharpton’s co-chair, is when will an apology be issued? - John Thompson

Last week, I joked that the Broad Foundation should start recruiting and supporting talented individuals who might want to help run teachers unions. Little did I know I wasn't that far off. The AFT, Broad, Gates, Mott, and Ford are all pooling money to do some collaborative work around innovation. The AFT is taking the lead with an event tomorrow (see advisory below).

Without more details it's hard to tell whether this is a fig leaf or something likely to generate changes from the status quo. Innovation means lots of things to lots of people. And it's not entirely unprecedented, at least for Broad. Broad funded TURN earlier in the decade, and has funded local-led innovation efforts in the past. There's also been funding for the Mooney Institute from Broad.

Model school or unaffordable luxury? Salt Lake TribuneWhen
a student at Granite High skips class, he'll likely get a personal
phone call that day from Principal Carol Harris. It's the kind of
school where sluffing doesn't go unnoticed, where the custodian knows
you by name, and the guidance counselor will collect money to cover
your college applications.

Mayoral control of schools? Not likely here Minneapolis Star TribuneThe U.S. education secretary is calling for big-city mayors to take
over struggling urban school districts. Local education experts don't
think it's necessary here.

At Scrabble Championship, It's All About The Q
NPRIt's
hip to be square this weekend at the annual National School Scrabble
Competition in Providence, R.I., where middle schoolers are facing off.
The team that makes the highest play using the letter Q wins a signed
Shaquille O'Neal basketball jersey.

Sometimes I worry that skimming and posting these things mean I'll never actually reflect and write on them:

Getting Smarter About IQ The American ProspectSimple advances, like adequate vision and dental care, can do more for
the nation's children than theoretical debates about education
inequality.

Woman Hires Stripper To Take Her Place At High School Reunion JezebelWachner,
class of 1995, decided that instead of returning to her high school,
which she notes was "a pressure cooker"...decided she'd send a representative on her behalf—a stripper
she hired to assume her identity and shock her former classmates.

Fighting Deadly Flu, Mexico Shuts Schools NYTMexican
officials, scrambling to control a swine flu outbreak that has killed
as many as 61 people and infected possibly hundreds more in recent
weeks, closed museums and shuttered schools for millions of students in
and around the capital on Friday, and urged people with flu symptoms to
stay home from work.

Brain Gain The New YorkerUnlike many hypothetical scenarios
that bioethicists worry about—human clones, “designer babies”—cognitive
enhancement is already in full swing.

Moving Beyond Bias.The New RepublicWhich
falls more into the spirit of black uplift that you could explain to a
foreigner in less than three minutes: teaching black candidates how to
show what they are made of despite obstacles, or banning a test of
mental agility as inappropriate to impose on black candidates?

Comment Is King NY Times MagazineMost journalists hate to read it [reader commentary], because it’s stinging and
distracting, and readers rarely plow through long comments sections
unless they intend to post something themselves.

Fritz had it yesterday morning, and nothing's official until May but I think you can count on it: Ed Sector communications guru Stacey Jordan is headed to the Department, where she'll do intergov communications. Official title: Director of Intergovernmental Affairs in the Office of Communication and Outreach (or something like that). She used to work in the NYC DOE and for the Mayor of Providence, which will come in handy when it comes time to make sure these governors and mayors are doing right by their stimulus money. In addition to fancy bachelor's and master's degrees (official bio here), she's a proud graduate of Francis W. Parker School in Chicago. Go Colonels.

I asked my colleagues to send me some stuff they're writing that I might have missed in my morning roundups. Here are some of the stories -- good stuff, I think:

National Curriculum Inching Forward [In Australia] EdWeekSome [Australian] states have questioned whether national benchmarks would lower the
bar for students already immersed in rigorous studies. Subject-area
experts have suggested that draft outlines, particularly in English and
history, have set unrealistic expectations.

KIPP is ready to start bargaining Gotham SchoolsLevin’s
enthusiasm to begin bargaining suggests that he does not intend to
abandon the Brooklyn school, a possibility some observers privately
raised after the teachers first said they wanted to form a union.

Schools to try educational effort on heroin Gazette XtraWhile
heroin use among high school students seems to be mainly among
12th-graders, the last time Janesville students get any formal drug
education is in freshman health class.

The Ed. Dept.'s NCLB Strategy Politics K12An
adviser to Arne Duncan says political strategy is behind the decision
not to make more significant changes to Title I regulations.

Jay Mathews Yields to Persuasion LFA
You have to admire Washington Post columnist
Jay Mathews for his openness to persuasion. Unlike so many education
commentators, he is willing to budge an inch or two in the face of
compelling arguments.

This time of year I always wish I could have known each student's story in August as I am now learning to understand them. When our high school and middle school merged, I had a chance to review the old paper files from my students' feeder schools. I was struck by the number of kids who were reported to be cheerful, bright, and successful before tragedies struck. We're in the 21st century, and yet the system has no way adjusting so that the death of a mother in the 4th grade, for instance, does not sentence the child to a lifetime of educational failure and poverty?

When GEAR UP introduced the idea of IEPs for all students, I groaned as I anticipated another primitive, underfunded "quick fix" that generated more meaningless paperwork and prevented the assessment of disciplinary consequences. Maybe I'm naive, but could the Stimulus money finance a state-of-the-art digital system for individual records and the results of previous interventions? As with the health care industry's challenge of putting medical records online, the challenge would be huge - not something that teachers slap together in their spare time. Even with the proper funding and recruiting the talent for such a task, the mission should keep the the computer people so busy that they wouldn't have time for devising silly value-added accountability models. - John Thompson

Stimulus money may fund summer school, teacher pay AP Education Secretary Arne Duncan
has some suggestions for how schools can spend their windfall from the
economic stimulus law, including summer school and extra pay for
teachers to coach struggling colleagues.

Tutoring program not hitting its marks Las Vegas SunThe
findings suggest “we're not getting a lot for what we're paying,” said
Gail Sunderman, a senior research scientist at George Washington
University who took part in a five-year study of No Child Left Behind.

Utah fires science curriculum leader Salt Lake TribuneSome
teachers are saying the firing of a state science education leader was
unfair and political. Velma Itamura, who said she worked to help
develop and implement the state science curriculum at the Utah State
Office of Education, said she was terminated from her job as state
science specialist

I'm happy to say that the new batch of Spencer Education Journalism Fellows has been announced -- the second year of the program, based at Columbia's Journalism School.
The 2009-10 fellows include: Peg Tyre, a former senior reporter at Newsweek Magazine; Sarah Garland, a reporter at Newsweek International; and Elizabeth Green,
who covered education for U.S. News & World Report and the now
defunct New York Sun. Congrats to them all. I'm sure their projects are going to be amazing.

Quotables Mike Klonsky"Friedman has been
wrong on so many issues. He is mighty lucky the NY Times doesn’t use a
pay-for-performance model."

Another Piece of Evidence for Mayoral Control Chad AdelmanInstead of evaluating a district leader solely on the
basis of student test scores, it would be nice to know more information
like this, on the quality of the work force.

Bored of seeing Arne go around the country giving out money and talking about how the stimulus money is going to make schools dramatically better? Concerned that many the stories you're reading (or writing) are nothing more than fluffy "beat sweeteners" not real news? Here are some questions to consider:

1 -- What's up with the slow pace of appointments? This Washington Post article suggests that the USDE is lagging behind. Still no Deputy, in case you hadn't noticed -- can we have one by Memorial Day?

2 -- Tell us again about that "Renaissance 2010" thing, will you? A newly released report from Chicago suggests that the new schools created under Duncan's signature reform program aren't any better than the ones he closed down. Any evidence that you did better in the second two years?

3 -- So you like to close schools, do you? A second report from Chicago, this one dug out by an advocacy group called PURE, suggests that the impact closing down low-performing schools isn't as clear as you claimed. Any regrets or things you'd change about the closings?

4 -- What about all the violence? Thirty-two school-age kids have died in Chicago since September -- a record amount already. None took place on campus, but the problem of gangs and gang "control" of schools is obvious to educators in Chicago. Who's responsibility is that, and what did you do to make sure that the issue was getting enough attention?

5 -- How exactly how are you going to give states and districts more flexibility while measuring them against common (international) standards? Tight/loose doesn't work when the elements you're talking about are directly contradictory.

It was at the funeral of my Seriously Emotionally Disturbed student when his father, who had repeatedly insisted that his son had no future, walked out of the services when I decided I could not leave the classroom and turned down a prestigious opportunity in Denver that would have tripled my salary, so please do not take this wrong. Most special educational students are delightful and have too much dignity to abuse IDEA protections. And the Progressive Policy Institute’s outstanding reporton special education covers a range of issues. I just have to cite its analysis of the issue, discipline, where so much damage is done to neighborhood inner city schools.

"Fair or not, there is a perception among school personnel that the IDEA simply blocks discipline," said a principal in Virginia, describing a case where an elementary student’s "drug-holding was related to disability... that the student had low self-esteem rooted in his speech and language deficits, and that the student became involved in drug use in an effort to obtain peer approval."

Other Virginia principals described the difficulty of maintaining two sets of disciplinary consequences, and the temptation to lower behavioral standards for all because the school could not discipline students on IEPs,

Dropout rate declines in some cities Kansas City StarIn
all, 13 cities saw double-digit improvement in their graduation rates,
according to the study released Wednesday by America's Promise Alliance.

Ind. Lawmakers Pass Teacher Lawsuit Shield Indy StarHouse
Bill 1462, which now heads to Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, would
provide "qualified immunity" to educators who follow school procedures
while breaking up a fight or disciplining students. The law is designed
to make it easier for judges to dismiss lawsuits brought by parents who
disagree with disciplinary actions. Via ECS.

Swimming Without A Suit Tom Friedman NYTIf America had closed the international achievement gap between 1983 and 1998 and had raised its performance to the level of such nations as Finland and South Korea, United States G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $1.3 trillion and $2.3 trillion higher.

Reform's faulty assumptions
Mike KlonskyWolk holds up as a model the very system that most embodies the faulty assumptions he is attacking.

College Board steps into the immigration debate
LA TimesTrustees
of the association that administers the SAT vote to support the Dream
Act, which would offer some undocumented youths a path to citizenship
through college or the military.

Besides a quote from Dave Levin and a nice picture of Kashi Nelson, the
KIPP teacher who belatedly changed her mind about unionization, yesterday's NY Times story about the KIPP AMP mess (here) didn't seem to add much to the story I reported last month (A Teacher Changes Her Mind). Yes, reported. Take a look and I think you'll see what I'm talking about.

To be sure, I would have loved some acknowledgment for having been first to report this. My scoops are rare, since I do so little reporting. Then again, everyone knows that big papers don't like to credit competitors who beat them to a story, especially annoying little blogs. Things like this happen all the time.

And of course, I steal stuff from the Times every day, including for example this nice picture of Kashi Nelson, the KIPP teacher who belatedly changed her mind about unionization. So I don't like it, but I guess it serves me right. You know I broke this story. They know, too. They're probably just trying to even the score.

But They Did Not Seat the Deputy Washington PostThe Cabinet agencies filling up fastest so far, counting holdovers, are
the Justice Department, with 29 percent of its openings filled;
Agriculture, at 25 percent; the Pentagon, with 21 percent; and the
State Department, coming in at just under 19 percent, according to the
NYU data.

Ads Aim to Build Political Support EdWeekAn
advocacy group for children and youths has mounted a media effort aimed
at federal lawmakers from four states, urging them to vote for
President Barack Obama’s proposed 2010 budget because of the increased
funding it would provide for early-childhood programs.

School strip-search arguments vex justices MSNBCThe
Supreme Court seemed worried Tuesday about tying the hands of school
officials looking for drugs and weapons as they wrestled with the
appropriateness of a strip-search of a teen.

What's the world coming to? Apparently, the regular stream of education types on the Colbert Report aren't all just due to the influence of super-producer Emily Lazar, who's also the wife of Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter. Colbert himself is involved.

Specifically, he's a new board member for DonorsChoose.org. Those rascals really know how to do the media thing, don't they. And today, Colbert, DonorsChoose, and Vicki Phillips (of Gates) did an event at a Manhattan school. Footage to come.

Colbert's done DonorsChoose things in the past -- his run for President
included a DonorsChoose bit, and he talked about them a lot during this
interview, too (DonorsChoose On The Colbert Report).

Good For Me, But Not For Thee Robert PondiscioA
new survey by the conservative Heritage Foundation reveals 44 percent
of Senators and 36 percent of Representatives sent their children to
private school.

What's Wrong With Merit Pay Diane RavitchIs it possible to have an education system that mis-educates
students while raising their test scores? Yes, I think it is. We may
soon prove it.

In its review of these Nextel ads, Slate says "I would like to see a sequel in which the kids wise up with their own
walkie-talkie-coordinated escape and then spend an awesome skip day
drinking Mountain Dew and doing whatever it is kids do these
days—Twittering naked pictures of themselves onto the Xbox chat room
and what have you." (The weird populism of Nextel's new ads)

Dan Ariely's experiments in Predictably Irrational offer another explanation of why it was inevitable that data-driven accountability would have a corrupting effect on schools, and the theorists who embraced it. Ariely showed that cheating increases dramatically when the stakes are not money but a coupon, even if it can immediately be transformed into money. This obviously explains the additional lure of corruption with stocks and complex financial packages, as well as NCLB-type accountability. Dishonesty also increases when people see others cheating in an open manner, thus creating a social acceptance of the transgression. Cheating grows further when it is obvious that violators come from the same social milieu. Dishonesty is discouraged, however, when people see cheating by people from another social set.

Neither does Behavioral Economics does not lend support for Pay for Performance. People who would change a flat tire for free are less likely to help if offered five dollars, because the transaction is thus switched from the "social domain" to the "market domain."

Over at District 299, there's an interminably long and self-involved post about my long-ago near-brush with working for the UFT (My Almost-Job With The UFT). The most interesting part of the whole thing is considering how few people have worked on both sides of the union-management divide, which I think would be a good thing for everyone involved.

I know of only two -- Jonathan Gyurko (NYC DOE / UFT) and Matt Gandel (AFT / Achieve). A friend reminds me that Denver's Brad Jupp went from the union local to the central office. Are there others who've worked both sides of the street, so to speak, and -- more important -- has it helped them do their jobs better in any observable way? If so, I propose that TFA and the Broad Foundation start placing people in union locals ASAP.

Aid Expert Appointed (Finally) Inside Higher Ed Monday, Duncan that Shireman would join the administration on a permanent basis, as
deputy under secretary for postsecondary education, which a department
spokesman described as a new position that would not require Senate
confirmation.

Pa. boy orders secret state tests to 'play school'
APThe Pennsylvania Education Department plans to tighten security
after a fifth-grader who wanted to "play school" ordered a batch of
secret state school assessment tests from his western Pennsylvania
home....